Saul Bellow

The most successful Jewish American writer may be the most ambivalent as well.

Reprinted with permission from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published by W.W. Norton & Company.

 

"This spare old man," as Saul Bellow recalls the Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon in Jerusalem, "asked me if any of my books had been translated into Hebrew. If they had not been, I had better see to it immediately, because, he said, they would survive only in the Holy Tongue." But what about Heinrich Heine's imperishable German? "Ah," said Agnon, "we have him beautifully translated into Hebrew. He is safe." Bellow's account then turns to Isaac Babel, whose stories he calls "characteristically Jewish" though "written in Russian by a man who knew Yiddish well enough to have written them in that language." It's not that Bellow, in post‑Holocaust America, had the option to write in a Jewish language, whether Hebrew or Yiddish. What's at issue is a vital, viable identity for Jewish fiction in the Diaspora.

 

Although the marks of this identity are too variegated, too dispersed, to be found fully in any single writer, Saul Bellow has often seemed to epitomize them. His heroes all suffer, Robert Alter points out, from "humanitis," as in Bellow's play The Last Analysis (1965): that is, "when the human condition gets to be too much for you." Yet they don't merely suffer, they act--or rather, they speak, like Moses Herzog (in Bellow's 1964 novel Herzog) "writing letters to everyone under the sun," including Nietzsche, Spinoza, Eisenhower, even God. They need to know what it is to be human. Philosophers do not know it, but a novelist can show us (in Herzog's words) "the strength of a man's virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life." By this measure, Bellow rejects what he calls "Wasteland pessimism."

 

The often‑comic irony of a craving mind in a failing body, or of spirit versus history--that is, the essential human condition--has sometimes seemed quintessentially Jewish: witness the half‑Hebrew half‑Yiddish proverb "Thou hast chosen us from among the nations--why did you have to pick on the Jews?" Saul Bellow's prose embodies this irony. "The dominant American Jewish style," as Irving Howe sees it, is "brought to a pitch by Saul Bellow": "a yoking of opposites, gutter vividness with…high‑culture rhetoric"; "a strong infusion of Yiddish…through ironic twistings"; "a rapid, nervous, breathless tempo"; "a deliberate loosening of syntax, as if to mock those niceties of Correct English which Gore Vidal and other untainted Americans hold dear."

 

Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, on June 10, 1915, soon after his parents emigrated from Russia. "My life in Canada was partly frontier, partly the Polish ghetto, partly the Middle Ages…I was brought up in a polyglot community," with Hebrew, Yiddish, French, and English. When Bellow was nine, his family moved from Montreal to Chicago, where he went to the University of Chicago and graduated Northwestern in sociology and anthropology. He spent most of his life in that city, was close friends with Isaac Rosenfeld and Delmore Schwartz, and became a permanent member of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. His early books, The Victim (1947) and Seize the Day (1956), articulated a postwar existential malaise, at once thwarted and driven, far from the half‑assimilating suburban Jews that Philip Roth satirized. These novels depict "the city man who feels that the sky is constantly coming down on him," as Alfred Kazin puts it, and who seeks above all to know "the reason of things."

 

Bellow is the only writer to have won the National Book Award three times, for The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). Probably his authorial genius emerges most compellingly over the span of a novel, yet his short stories can draw us in fully, too. The Old System, from Mosby's Memoirs (1968), stands alongside Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle (and also Faulkner's work) as a twentieth‑century family saga. Told from the vantage point of immigrants and their offspring, these searching stories expose Jewish American families tangling in the bonds of love.

 

Bellow has resisted the label "Jewish American writer" as "intellectually vulgar, unnecessarily parochial." "I'm well aware of being Jewish and also of being American and of being a writer. But I'm also a hockey fan, a fact which nobody ever mentions." But if Babel's Red Cavalry tales are "characteristically Jewish," then Bellow's own stories are no less so. Something to Remember Me By, while not circumstantially Jewish has the (ironically undercut) quality of a traditional Hebrew "Ethical Will." And it begins, we're told exactly, in February 1933, but we're not told that this is just days after Hitler's accession to power: Here in Chicago, the innocent victim is only a sexual schlemiel. Like Kazin the schoolboy reading books even while pulling on his socks in the morning, Bellow's protagonist (age 17, as Bellow himself was in February 1933) carries around pages torn from a book he's reading and regrets their loss more than anything else. When his father cuffs him at the end of the day, this gladdens the son: His mother, who was dying, must not yet have died.

 

One test of Bellow's Diaspora Jewishness took the form of a three‑month Israeli sojourn in 1975, an effort few American authors have made. Whereas his own fictional characters almost flourish in the gap between the ideal and the real Israeli reality, Bellow finds, abrades against the nation's spiritual aspiration. "I listen carefully, closely, more closely than I've ever listened in my life." Here, "you cannot take your right to live for granted"; he feels for Israel's writers, "continuously summoned to solidarity."

 

Throughout, Bellow takes empathic, yet balanced, views and finds what's lacking in America: "Life in Israel is far from enviable, yet there is a clear purpose in it." He is "heartsick about leaving" but entitles his 1976 account of this journey, significantly, To Jerusalem and Back.